When people attend meetings or conferences (e.g., business meetings, lectures, events, etc.) they often miss important parts of the discussion because they arrived late, they had to step out of the room, or they became distracted. As a result, such persons generally would like to catch up on what they missed from the meeting. They may ask other meeting participants to update them on what they missed, but such an approach may disrupt the flow of the meeting.
Different types of conferencing techniques exist for enabling persons located remotely from each other to participate in a meeting. For instance, a teleconference is the live exchange of information in audio form among persons located remotely from each another using devices linked by a telecommunications system. A videoconference is similar to a teleconference, where persons that are located remotely from each other are enabled to exchange information in not only audio but also video form. Telepresence is still another technology that enables remotely located persons to interact with each other, such as being enabled to perform videoconferencing with application sharing. Such conferencing techniques for distributed meetings may also suffer from the deficiencies mentioned above for face-to-face meetings, where persons may miss a portion of a conference, and thus would like to catch up on what they missed. Moreover, such persons may want to be able to catch up on what they missed while the conference is still being conducted, so that they can participate in later portions of the conference. Such a situation is very different from a digital video recording scenario where it does not matter if the recorded content is watched live (e.g., watching a broadcast television program as it is received) or in recorded form (e.g., recording the broadcast television program and watching it later). Reviewing portions of a conference while it is still live is a different and much more difficult problem than watching recorded television programs.
Research has been performed on developing techniques for meeting capture and replay. According to the majority of such techniques, however, replay is enabled to be performed after the meeting is over. Another existing meeting capture and replay technique enables faster audio replay. The audio portion of a conference is recorded, analyzed, less important segments of audio are dropped, and the remaining audio is played back to enable persons to hear earlier portions of the conference. Removing unnecessary segments from audio has the effect of speeding up playback causing the replay to catch up with the live conference. However, as described above, modern conferences may have more modalities than just audio, such as video, text and shared data. Eliminating unimportant parts for video and shared data modalities is not trivial and prone to errors.